A Chat with Angela & Beth - Greek, Hebrew & YouTube! Part 2

Workflow for Planning and Recording Language Lessons

Hello everyone, I'm Angela. In this video, Bethany and I chat about our experiences in creating Greek and Hebrew lessons. We also talk a little bit about what happens behind the scenes. If you haven't watched the first half, head over to her channel, Aleph with Beth, and check it out.

Here's the second half.

Enjoy.

So what does your workflow look like for planning lessons? How long does it take you to plan? How far in advance do you plan lessons?

Um, so how long it takes me, um, depends. If it all goes well, probably a day or two to plan a lesson. But it could, you know, it could be a bit longer. Just also there's other prep to do, like finding props and sometimes making them, then it can take a bit longer.

Yeah.

Um, and, uh, yeah, how much, I don't know, about eight hours or something to, to plan a lesson if all goes well. And then, right, the next step would be to either have it checked before I film it, which is, I'm hoping to do that to save some time of making mistakes.

But I don't know if that's, you know, limited resources, so I don't know if that's going to happen. But for the moment, I've had like probably a day or two of planning and then recording would take, um, probably four or five hours for a 15 to 20 minute lesson.

Um, hoping to bring that down. That includes a lot of, uh, yeah, it's setting up everything and getting it working. You know, a lot of, uh, what do you call it? Learning curves. That's not the word I'm looking for.

Yeah, all the troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting.

All right. Um, and I'm starting to actually, I've changed it and sometimes it can take me longer. Well, five, five hours or whatever, because I'm actually taking the stuff, putting it in, um, in my, in my video editing program just to see what it looks like, um, hear if I made any mistakes because I don't have anybody watching me and saying, oh, you just did that or whatever.

I only see it afterwards. So, um, and it can be really simple mistake that you just, I've got so much else to focus on. I didn't realize.

So.

I hear you.

Yeah.

So, um, so there's that. And then the editing process, which can take anything from 20, 30 hours to 50 hours if, um, yeah, depending on how things go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then, then that's, then after that, um, sending it off to have some of my volunteers, uh, who have good Greek to watch them. And, um, yeah. And my, my beginners of Greek students, Bethany, to watch it and just tell me if the, if.

It'll be like, Angela, I didn't understand this part.

All right.

And then that, all right. Then that helps me to know how to change things. And then doing the editing necessary, um, that the, from the feedback that I get. And then the publishing process, which takes a couple of hours to, to upload it onto YouTube and get everything sorted.

Yeah.

I'm always surprised by how long it takes me to finalize a video after everything's done. I have to watch it again. I usually export it and watch the exported version again to make sure that there weren't any little problems that didn't show inside the editing program.

But then, uh, that you'd only see after exporting it and then uploading it and then creating the thumbnail and writing the description. I mean, yeah.

Yeah.

It takes a surprisingly long time just to get the thing finally on YouTube.

Learning by Making and Revising Language Resources

Yeah. And you think, oh, I finished the video.

Yeah.

And then two days later you're still publishing it after.

You're finally like able to publish it. I know.

Yeah.

I had an exciting thing happen this week. Um, I'm visiting family here and they have a really big HDTV, which I, I do not have a television. So, um, I got to watch my lessons on there. And so I saw it from a totally different perspective and see, oh, I can see little mistakes that I made in editing here.

I know. Well, that's the worst is seeing all your editing mistakes after you published it. I had that yesterday. I was going back and watching some old videos for a class we're teaching here in Mexico.

And I was like, I did such a terrible editing job. Oh, and Andrew was like, don't worry about it. It's okay. I'm like, no, it's so bad. I'm so embarrassed. But that's the learning curve. You know, we all start out like I'd never really edited videos before, um, except for, you know, random little things.

And so, yeah, definitely. It's been a big learning curve.

Yeah.

You can add that to the time consuming thing is when you don't know how to do something is then you.

Oh, yeah.

Google how to do this.

All the YouTube tutorials to figure out.

All right.

I know it.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Well, how many how many lessons in advance do you kind of have in mind? Like me, for example, I kind of usually have a vague, fuzzy idea of roughly the next five lessons, like what topics I'm going to cover.

Right.

But then that will usually change as I'm making the lessons and my ad topic in or, you know, change things up. Things tend to change a lot as I'm going. But how far down the road are you able to see at this point?

Planning Lessons Around Future Texts and Stories

Yeah, pretty much the same. I remember you warning me about that in the beginning, not to plan too many lessons in too much detail because it does change. And it certainly does change because as you start teaching, you get new ideas and you think, oh, wait, this might be clear if I if I go in this direction or do this differently.

So I do have I don't know, I probably have enough topics for the next 10 lessons, five to 10 lessons. But I don't know how they exactly which is going to come first. It's going to depend on how it works out.

So at the moment, probably only two or excuse me, two or three lessons ahead. And sometimes when life has been hectic, which my life has been the last couple of months, I've only been managed to really plan one lesson with a vague idea of what I'm going to do in the next couple of months.

I mean, I know what I'm going to do, but it's not planned. It's not written down.

Yeah.

That makes sense. For me, it's been helpful once I kind of got out of the stage that you're in now where you're still building like the super basics and you're not able you're kind of doing random Bible verses, but you're not to the point where you can tell a story from the Bible yet.

So once I got out of that stage and into the point where we could start to tackle more simplified texts, I've found it helpful to kind of choose what is the next text or simplified story that we're going to look at.

And then kind of aim towards that. OK, so in order to understand that, what grammar and what vocabulary am I going to need to put in place to get to that story? And then those kind of serve as little milestones along the way for me.

So maybe you'll get to that point where you can kind of be guided by what texts you want to do.

Yeah, I have already planned a couple of scriptures that I would like. Some of the first Bible stories that are going to be in the lessons, but the grammar is really too complicated at this stage. So, yeah, although I am working towards them, it's a little bit too far away to say that they're included in my plan.

Totally.

But there are, you know, I'm still wrestling with whether to write a simplified Bible story because then you're changing the text. But I think it's appropriate in this probably like a children's Bible story.

But even so, it's surprisingly difficult grammar for a beginner. So, yeah, what I have done is written a couple of just stories that are not biblical, that have the same vocabulary and grammar. And slowly those stories would become a little bit, you know, slowly the grammar will become more complex until we're able to understand a biblical story.

But it will take some time to get there.

Cool. We look forward to that. That's exciting.

Yeah.

Yeah, even when we feel like we've reached our goals, which I don't know, sometimes I doubt whether that day will ever come. We'll actually be like, yay, the course, it's done. By God's grace, someday that day will come.

But sometimes I wonder. But even then, I'd like to go back and write more simplified stories for different levels.

You're right.

Just add more content at those easy levels, more easy stories, more videos, especially at the really super beginning levels when people are trying to learn how to read. And they need some simple literacy style books, primer style stories to get going.

So, I think that this job will never end because even when we finish, there's tons more content that we could be creating and that people could use.

Joining the Team and Writing Simple Stories in Biblical Languages

Well, let me use this as an opportunity to speak to you guys out there. If you are somebody who your biblical Greek is good and you want to get involved in somehow, there's so much work to do. We really can't do this on our own.

And so, if you would like to write some stories for us, we'd be so, so happy for you to do that and it would be a great help. I've got one volunteer who's starting to write some simple stories for me.

Cool.

But we need more.

Yeah, yeah. Join the team. We'd love to see an army of creators out there making simple stories in the biblical languages and making videos or just illustrated books or whatever. It would be really great.

Yeah, yeah.

That's what we'd love to see.

Yeah, this is, I think you guys feel the same. This is not my work or whatever. It's really a team. And for people, all people who have the heart to get biblical languages out there, we want you to get involved.

And help us to improve and to have more content and give us ideas.

And I would say, too, that if you're at a point where you have a solid grasp of the grammar of, say, Hebrew or Greek, that trying to write simple stories in Hebrew or Greek will definitely reveal to you the holes that you have in your knowledge, as it did for me.

And I'm sure you, too, Angela. All of a sudden you realize, wow, there's a lot of questions that I need to figure out how to answer that I never thought of before when you were just reading the text. And when you're starting to compose in that language, suddenly it kind of forces your knowledge to be challenged.

You have to grow. So I think it's a fantastic way. I found for me personally that creating all these resources has been the biggest catalyst for growth in my own language abilities with Hebrew.

Definitely.

I would say the number one. I mean, I learned a lot in my classes, and it's been great. But having to go to the text to find the answers to my random questions that come up while composing in Hebrew has definitely been super, super valuable for my own growth in the language.

Right.

I think that applies to you across the board. You can go to university and get a degree and you've just learned all the stuff, but then how do you apply it?

Yeah.

And I think that's also with Greek. When you start trying to use a language, then you, as you say, you really start seeing how well you've grasped the language. And I think with ancient Greek or biblical Greek, when you start speaking it, you find that there's things that you want to say that aren't in the text, especially if you're limiting yourself to the New Testament, which you can't.

So sometimes you're trying to think, how do I say this? There's no example in the New Testament. So you can look further maybe in the Septuagint. You can't find it there. Then you have to go and look further in other texts, and maybe you don't find it there either.

And then you have to just use the principle and try and just apply the principle. And I also just consult other people whose Greek is better than mine.

Resources for Teachers, Students, and Children

Well, that's one of the advantages you have teaching Greek. The grammar may be more complex, but you do have a way bigger corpus of texts from that era that you can draw on. Whereas with Hebrew, we really only have the Hebrew Bible for that era.

That's basically the only text we have to work with. So if it's not there, we could look to later versions of Hebrew. But yeah, for that era, there's nowhere else to look. So if it's not there, it's not there.

So I kind of envy you that you have more like the classics and other texts that you can go looking for your answers if you can't find it in the relatively short New Testament.

Yeah.

Well, I'm really looking forward to getting better at the technical side so I can have more time to read the classics.

Yes.

Oh, I know.

There's like five different grammatical things in Hebrew. I feel like I really need to investigate and read a lot of academic papers and stuff. But yeah, time.

Time, right.

As a mom, I'm trying to keep the videos coming. I'm like, all right, Lord, give me wisdom for whatever it is.

Right.

It's so great that you guys have got so many different... You're getting to the stage where you're producing all different kinds of resources, so many resources for your students and also for teachers.

I have quite a few teachers writing to me and saying that they're so excited about the series that they started using it in their classes. And yeah, that's exciting for me too. And I love to get that kind of feedback.

And one of my goals in the future is hopefully to write kind of a manual for teachers on how to use these lessons in their classes. Because I know that sometimes you get... That's what reminded me of it was when we were talking about how do I say this?

I think that's one of the biggest challenges for teachers. You know, you have to learn to speak Greek. And then you come to something and I'm like, well, how do I say this? And it would be nice to have a resource to help teachers with that and also just understand why did you say it like that?

I've never read that in a Greek grammar. And just explain. Yeah, there's some really, really simple things that you can't find in a grammar or necessarily written in the way that you need to hear it.

Absolutely.

That's a long term goal, though, because we've got to get some lessons out first.

Yeah, I was just telling Andrew the other day, I feel like this project that we've taken on gets bigger every year, not smaller. The vision just keeps expanding. I mean, there's just so many things I would love to make available to everybody.

For example, one of my dreams is to like, well, one of our dreams is to create or have somebody, some volunteer or somebody help us create like children's activities. So if you're doing their videos with kids, you can have like activities for them to do that go along with each lesson.

I'd love to film doing specific interactive classroom activities and have instructions for those that also accompany each lesson. So you could like watch lesson one together and do the activities together in a small group.

I mean, ideas are overflowing. Time is what there's not enough of to do all of this. So, yeah, I hope that as you continue to, you're able to put in place some really key things that will help teachers as well, like you're saying.

I think that God is gracious. I think that He will provide at the right time because we can't do everything at once. It's too overwhelming. So as we progress, bring the right people along and make it grow in the right direction when the right time comes.

One thing at a time. I mean, just three years ago when we started I Live With Beth, Andrew and I were talking the other day, we never imagined where we are today. So, I mean, we just have to see what God decides to do in the next three years.

And see what kind of other people He's brought along into our lives to help out with different aspects and how He chooses to direct us.

Favorite Parts of the Work and the Privilege of Serving the Lord

Let me ask you, what is your favorite part of this job?

Well, it's a huge creative outlet for me to create the final project. I love teaching and I love bringing in all of the graphic design and beauty of trying to make something attractive. And pedagogically fun.

So I get a lot of satisfaction just out of making the final product that I'm really excited to share with everybody. So that's a big win for me. I love that part. I also, like I said before, I'm always really excited to hear when people take the time to write nice comments or send us nice emails about how much the lessons have helped them with their Hebrew.

Or how they may have struggled in the past, but now they're finding they finally have some hope of actually learning Hebrew and enjoying it. Or that their kids are learning it and their kids are excited about Hebrew.

And all of that, those kind of testimonies are also a super highlight for me. So, yeah, those are a couple of the best things.

Yeah. Well, you took all of them. Because I think you and I are kind of similar in that way.

You can just say ditto.

Ditto, yeah. Those definitely are the highlights. I'm a creative person and so it's a great way to kind of, I think all my creativity, different aspects of it, that you get an opportunity to use it here.

Teaching as well as creating little props or drawings or whatever there is. And also enjoy the video editing. Yeah, and love hearing back from people who are enjoying it and children. And I think the other aspect is just the privilege of doing this for the Lord.

And seeing just some things, oh, you can see it's His hand that's guiding us and providing. And, yeah, it's exciting to hear some testimonies. And I'm hoping to hear more testimonies from the field, from Bible translators.

Yeah, as this gets into the hands of the people that we started out making it for.

Right.

More than anybody.

Yeah.

I'd say one thing that maybe might surprise people is that, because sometimes I tell people this and they're like, really? But I, growing up, never was a camera person. Like, I was really uncomfortable with being on camera.

And especially video. I didn't really like getting my photo taken, but even less did I enjoy being on video. And so, I just have to say, God's grace has helped me a lot in overcoming that. Also, my husband's encouragement has been really great in getting me to the point where I can just do an interview like this even and be comfortable.

So, you never know. You might think, oh, I could never do that because I'm not a camera person.

Yeah.

God might surprise you. He really might. So, yeah.

Yeah, I think that God often chooses us in what we think are our weaknesses. Right. Because I definitely also, I'm a super introvert, not extrovert. And so, being in front of a camera in front of lots of people is not my most comfortable place.

Yeah.

But, yeah, speeches at school were my nightmare, having to get on the stage. But if I look back in my life, I see how God has put me in different circumstances to help me get over that and to be able to do this.

Yeah, I laugh sometimes. I think of all my siblings, I was the least likely to become a YouTuber. Here I am, the YouTuber of the family.

You do a great job.

Never saw that coming.

Absolutely never saw that coming. But it's definitely been a little bit of a challenge to learn how to be okay with being out there, having my face in public like that. You know, you feel exposed. I know you've experienced this too, Angela, a little bit.

You just feel a little bit vulnerable and exposed when your pronunciation, your voice, your face is out there so publicly. And I just do it for God's glory and may He help me. But definitely it's been a learning curve and, you know, uncomfortable at times, but He's helping me.

Overcoming Camera Shyness and Learning to Be Public

Yeah, and we've learned to have a thick skin.

Or thicker than before.

Oh, yeah, thicker.

Maybe not thick all the way yet.

Yeah, we're still human. And there are some people, I don't know, maybe forget that we're human.

Yeah, there are still comments that wrinkle for like 24 hours and then you have to like move on.

Yeah. But the overwhelming positive response and wonderful people out there who are enjoying this and just make any negative comments go away.

Yeah.

No, seriously, it's been overwhelmingly positive from you all and we're so thankful for that. Really thankful for all your encouragement because it means a lot.

Yeah, constructive criticism is always, you know, that is why I present my work to other people to look at before we publish because we want good feedback.

We do want to keep improving. Yeah, I just want to say thank you again to all of you who are watching, especially to those who are volunteering for us in some way or who are giving to make all this possible.

And those of you who are praying for us, sometimes we have people send us, say, hey, we're praying for you. We really appreciate that. That's just such a big deal. So thank you all of you who are taking part in this project in some way and really grateful.

I feel like we're on a team.

Yes, you're part of our team. And I have to just deter that again, that prayer is just so central to this. We haven't talked about some of the challenges, but I know that prayer is so important to help us keep going forward and to keep our eye on the goal.

And also just thank you for those who have supported us financially. We wouldn't be able to do this without you, without your support and your encouraging words. And yeah, we're so grateful for you.

So we wish you guys a happy new year.

Yeah.

Happy 2023. And we look forward to learning more Hebrew and more Greek with you all.

Yeah, we're really excited for next year and all the plans that we have that we're going to do for you.

Yes, more videos that we can't wait to share because we get really excited about sharing videos with you all.

Yeah, we do. OK, thank you, Bethany. It's been great to chat to you.

Thank you, Angela. Yeah, you take care.

God bless.

Bye.

Bye.